• Plants provided early societies with shelter, clothing and fuel
  • humans have used biomass energy from plants (as fuels) for millenia

• Modern civilizations: plants provide various media for written communications

• Future civilizations: Are plant based products to answer to some of societies biggest problems
  • bioplastics?

• Basketry present in every human culture
  • tough to date, because perishable
  • Egyption baskest = 10,000 years old
  • predates pottery!!!

• Early humans may have used bird’s nests

• Basket making does cross gender barriers
  • Pomo tribe in California

• Plants used for baskets region dependent
  • palm and coconut in tropics
  • tree parts in temperate regions
  • grasses in prairies

• Fiber: long tapering plant cells with cellulose
  • ground tissues: sclerenchyma cells
  • thick cells walls
  • lignin, tannin, pectin

• Most valuable fibers are mostly cellulose and white
  • cellulose has tensile strength of steel

• Commercial fibers are elongate masses of plant material
  • not individual cells
  • limited # of plant species

• Provide cloth, rope, paper, etc for millennia
  • rope from flax 30,000 years ago

• RSW1 gene codes for the enzyme responsible for cellulose production
  • cellulose synthase

• Isolated in Arabidopsis and cotton

• Can scientists manipulate cellulose content of plants used for fibers?

• Surface fibers separated from plants mechanically
  • ginning

• Surface fibers separated from plants mechanically
  • ginning

• Soft fibers extracted using microbial degradation
  • retting, removes soft tissues

• Hard fibers scraped away by hand or machine
  • decortication

• First spinning wheel in India ~750 a.d
  • big advancements during industrial revolution

• Rendering cotton into cloth was discovered independently in new & old worlds

• Harvested from wild plant in coastal Peru 10,000 years ago
  • domesticated 4,500 years ago

• Cotton cloths dates 5,000 years in India
  • spread to Babylonia
  • Arabs brought cotton to Spain

• Cotton brought to Florida in 1556
  • commercial crop from southern colonies

• 20-30 species in the genus (Gossypium)
  • native to Asia, Africa, Americas and Australia
  • shrub with palmate leaves
  • warm climate with lots of water

• Currently the most popular natural fiber
  • 50% of world’ textiles

• Fruit of cotton is a capsule, splits along 5 seams
  • fibers are hairs that extend from seed coats (10)
  • 20,000 hairs per seed
  • hairs naturally twisted

• Bollgard = Bt cotton created by Monsanto
  • effective against many cotton pests
  • bollworms and budworms
  • one of most planted transgenic crops

• Bt cotton yield gain +10% in USA
  • large reductions in insecticide use

• Bollworm pests damage higher in India
  • small farms cannot afford insecticides
  • yields increase 60% with Bt

• Transgenic research combines cotton & polyester
  • feel of cotton + heat retention
  • ‘natural’ cotton-poly blend

• Flax (genus Linus) delicate, long, slender stems
  • fibers from phloem cells

• May be oldest plant fiber used to make cloth
  • 30,000 year old wild flax fibers in cave used during stone age
  • used to bind tools or weave baskets?
  • fibers appear to have been dyed!

• Ancient Egypt was the ‘land of linen’
  • worn by royalty or in mummy cloths
  • exported for use in sails

• Grown in Soviet Union, China and Western Europe

• Ranks next to food in importance to human society
  • construction, fuel, synthetics
  • strength & insulating properties (construction)

• 1/3 of land surfaces covered by forests
  • 7.5 million hectares removed a year
  • long history: humans w/ fire

• Usage rate exceeds regeneration
  • most forests unmanaged

• Forest removal greater for agriculture than for timber
  • or fuel

• Wood is secondary xylem (vascular cambium)
  • lots of strong (cellulose) dead cells

• Wood strength determined by cell wall thickness, types of xylem cells & fibers

• Hardwood lumber = angiosperm trees
• Softwood lumber = gymnosperm trees (conifers)

• Generally angiosperm lumber is more dense

• Wood pulp = watery suspension of pulverized wood
  • mostly xylem cells and fibers
  • ~50% of harvested wood goes to pulp
  • processing removes lignin (brown color)

• Traditional processing (chlorine) harmful to environment
  • utilization of wood-rotting fungi
  • transgenic Eucalyptus w/ low lignin

• Wood pulp used for paper, cardboard and cellophane

• Each American uses 700 lbs of paper
  • despite the internet
  • 1 billion trees harvested a year